Child Health and Development

teacher and six young students wearing red hats inside a greenhouse looking at plants

To reach their full potential, children need high-quality health care and services—especially in life’s early years. Health promotion, safety, disease prevention, and early identification and treatment during these earliest years lay the foundation for healthy development.

Mounting evidence that health during childhood sets the stage for adult health creates an important ethical, social, and economic imperative to ensure that all children are as healthy as they can be. Healthy children are more likely to become healthy adults. FPG's scientists study many aspects of child health and development—from prenatal health to infant brain development to stress management in adolescents.

Featured Publication

Published in the Handbook of Interpersonal Violence Across the Lifespan, "Neurobiological Consequences of Child Maltreatment" summarizes current research on the neurobiological mechanisms that are impacted by child maltreatment through neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, or emotional abuse. These adverse childhood experiences can be maladaptive for child neurodevelopment and increase the risks for later chronic, physical, and mental health conditions.

Featured Person

Implementation specialist Oscar Fleming, MSPH, focuses on program design, implementation science, applied research, coaching, and team development in support of evidence-based and other innovative programs. In conjunction with the National Center for Early Childhood Development, he works closely with Head Start professionals to enhance implementation capacity to improve programs and positive outcomes for children, families, and communities.

Featured Project

A new $3.6 million award from the NIMH supplements the BEE Study, which specifically focuses on the influence of poverty on brain development and cognitive development in children to determine how prenatal experiences might influence child development. The new study, "The Development of Gut Microbiota and Behavioral Inhibition in Childhood: The Role of Early Stress and Brain Development," will take the biobehavioral research even further to determine whether precursors to anxiety can be seen in gut health, and how that might impact a child's development.

Current Projects

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A Mechanistic Study of the Association Between Poverty and Executive Functions in Early Childhood: Contributions of Early Brain Development and the Early Caregiving Environment

The current study examines the link between poverty and executive functions (cognitive processes that facilitate learning, self-monitoring, and decision making) which are known to undergo rapid developmental change during the first years of life.

Black Infant and Toddler Equity Project

The purpose of this project as part of the Equity Research Action Coalition is to identify strengths-based programs and policies that support the well-being of Black parents and their infants and toddlers during the pandemic.

Carolina Consortium on Human Development

The CCHD is an NICHD-T32 funded program for predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees engaged in the advanced study of developmental science. Key features of the program include a seminar series, regular training events, an outstanding team of mentors, and a longstanding track record of training excellent fellows who now serve in institutions around the world.

Early Life Stress and the Environmental Origins of Disease: A Population-Based Prospective Longitudinal Study of Children in Rural Poverty (ECHO)

This project leverages and builds upon an existing longitudinal cohort to propose hypotheses that investigate the ways in which early life stress alters well-specified developmental processes to adversely affect neurodevelopment in childhood and increase risk for obesity and other health outcomes. It extends our prior data collection both retrospectively and prospectively in order to amplify and enhance our focus on adverse exposures and health and behavior outcomes.

Effects of Feedback Sensitivity and Emotion Regulation on Learning and School Performance in Adolescents From Multiple Countries

This project will examine cross-cultural patterns in feedback sensitivity, emotion regulation, and learning among adolescents. Findings may have practical applications to the classroom and could inform interventions for bolstering students' academic performance.

Equity Research Action Coalition

The Equity Research Action Coalition will co-construct with practitioners and policymakers actionable research to support the optimal development of Black children prenatally through childhood across the African diaspora using a cultural wealth framework. The coalition will focus on developing a science-based action framework to eradicate the impact of racism and poverty and all its consequences on the lives of Black children, families, and communities, and to ensure optimal health, well-being, school readiness and success, and overall excellence.

Equity-Focused Research Action Coalition and Repository Development

The goal of this project is to support the development of an interdisciplinary, multi-organizational research action coalition to identify anti-racist, culturally-sustaining, and asset-focused factors that ensure that Black children, their families, and communities thrive. Specific to this project is the development of a national repository/clearinghouse that provides up to date information on actionable research, practice, and policy evidence about what matters and works for Black children.

Family Life Project

The purpose of this project is to understand the early development trajectories in both poor and non-poor young children growing up in rural areas characterized by high poverty. An interdisciplinary team of investigators has been following children from birth with measurement of child, family, and school functioning, observed mother and father sensitivity and language input in the home setting, observed quality of instruction in child care and elementary school, characteristics of the community, and biomarkers of child and maternal stress.

Longitudinal Examination of DNA Methylation in Maltreated Children

We are examining psychiatric and health outcomes in a 5-year follow-up of 200 well-characterized, very high-risk, maltreated and non-maltreated children. This is an ideal study in which to examine patterns of stability and change in the regulation of stress-sensitive genes over time.

Packaging and Disseminating the JOIN for ME Program in Low-Income Settings

The JOIN for ME program is a pediatric weight management intervention that can be delivered in community settings, with potential for national dissemination. We will package the JOIN for ME program to increase acceptability and feasibility for delivery in low-income communities and test implementation in two novel settings: the housing authority and the patient-centered medical home. The revised JOIN for ME package will be tested in a rigorous implementation study.

Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families

The Frank Porter Graham Program on Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Families is a suite of programs related to self-compassion in families and schools. Our mission is to bring specialized self-compassion training to teens, pre-teens, children, parents, educators, and all adults who traverse the lives of youth, with the ultimate goal of creating a community embued with greater compassion for ourselves and others.

Rhode Island Asthma Integrated Response Program (RI-AIR)

The RI-Asthma Integrated Response (RI-AIR) Asthma Care Implementation Program (ACIP) is a comprehensive system of identification, screening, and intervention for pediatric asthma. We aim to demonstrate that RI-AIR ACIP is a replicable, evidence-based, and cost-saving model that improves asthma outcomes for children at most risk, and can be disseminated to other urban communities to address asthma disparities.

The Development of Gut Microbiota and Behavioral Inhibition in Childhood: The Role of Early Stress and Brain Development

The current study will be the first to examine the influence of early toxic stress, including the distal effects of living in poverty as well as the proximal factors of negative parenting and household chaos, on the development of gut microbiome diversity and maturity across 15, 24, 26, and 54 months.

The Power of Language: Does the Quality of Preschool Teacher Language Translate Into Children's Executive Functions?

This project will use secondary data analysis of two longitudinal datasets to test if childcare provider language prospectively predicts child executive functions (EFs) directly or indirectly through child language. We will also examine if different ways of measuring preschool teacher language quality are differentially predictive of child language and subsequent EFs.

The Targeted Reading Intervention: Investigating the Efficacy of a Web-Based Early Reading Intervention Professional Development Program for K-1 English Learners

The purpose of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of an early reading professional development program, the Targeted Reading Intervention (TRI), on young English learners' reading achievement.

Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute

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